Valve announces Steam Family
Sharing will launch next week in limited beta form, allowing players to lend
games to family and friends. Here's a bit from the FAQ: "Family Sharing is
enabled in one of two ways: You can either locally enable sharing in Account
Settings, with Family Sharing & Devices, or remotely respond to a userís Steam
request to share your previously installed games via email." Here's the
announcement:

September 11, 2013 - Steam Family Sharing, a new service
feature that allows close friends and family members to share their libraries of
Steam games, is coming to Steam, a leading platform for the delivery and
management of PC, Mac, and Linux games and software. The feature will become
available next week, in limited beta on Steam.

Steam Family Sharing is designed for close friends and family members to play
one another's Steam games while each earning their own Steam achievements and
storing their own saves and application data to the Steam cloud. It's all
enabled by authorizing a shared computer.

"Our customers have expressed a desire to share their digital games among
friends and family members, just as current retail games, books, DVDs, and other
physical media can be shared," explained Anna Sweet of Valve. "Family Sharing
was created in direct response to these user requests."

Once a device is authorized, the lender's library of Steam games becomes
available for others on the machine to access, download, and play. Though
simultaneous usage of an account's library is not allowed, the lender may always
access and play his games at any time. If he decides to start playing when a
friend is borrowing one of his games, the friend will be given a few minutes to
either purchase the game or quit playing.

Tim1_2 wrote on Sep 12, 2013, 07:52:This is actually a good feature, and a step in the right direction. People are complaining about it, but it's something Valve didn't have to do at all.

Steam will never let you give away games out of your library, or enable simultaneous use of the same game between accounts...that would just be a horrible business decision.

That's not what people want though, no one seriously thought they would get simultaneous usage of the same game, that's just silly. They want the ability to lend a game they are no longer playing to a friend or family member. It can have arbitrary time limits, could only be done once and other restrictions but at least it would be genuinely useful. Companies need to make money and people understand that but this doesn't need to impact their bottom line. People are complaining because they've been clamoring for that and instead you end up with a completely different implementation that isn't terribly useful outside of a few niche scenarios.

This is essentially account sharing without sharing the account password and it's arguably more awkward than the current workaround.

You're right though that it's a first step and things are moving in the right direction.